Yvo Desmedt's full statement for the 2009 IACR election

General statement

IACR should continue to promote research, maintain the high visibility of its publications, avoid change for its own sake and plan carefully. Having attended IACR Conferences since 1983 and having served on the board a total of 8 years, I have the experience to guarantee IACR takes the right decisions.

Previous involvement with IACR

a member since IACR's birth,
an author in IACR venues since 1983,
program chair of an IACR conference (Crypto '94) and an IACR workshop (PKC 2003), and
former director (2006-2008, 2001-2003, 1992-1993).

My main approach

As a researcher, I promote new technology. However, when voting on issues related to the future of IACR, it is important to analyze these carefully before rushing changes.
EXAMPLES

e-voting: seeing the cryptographic research on e-voting, it make sense for IACR to switch to e-voting and that is why I voted in 2008 for such a switch. However, as I warned the Board of Directors in 2008, IACR should avoid to rush choosing a system. IACR should avoid that its member's computers become a target of hackers. To demonstrate this risk, I supervised a 2008-2009 MSc thesis on "Hacking Helios" ( see Crypto 2009 Rump Session). IACR should take the issue of computer insecurity seriously into account.
No longer distribute paper proceedings: A straw poll was taken at the Crypto 2009 Member's Meeting. It turns out that a majority do not see the need to receive paper proceedings. However, did the Board of Directors (on which I did not serve in 2009) consider that this will require more power plugs in the conference room? Currently, only very few plugs are available in, e.g., the Crypto conference room! Again, this shows one should avoid rushing and that changes should be carefully planned.
Note: in the poll, I voted against no longer distributing paper formats of the proceedings, but for no longer distributing paper formats of the journal. Indeed, I get the journal at work, where electrical power is no problem. Moreover, after the conference, flying home, I can read the proceedings in the plane, without the need to carry lots of batteries!
Dropping Springer? There are at least three issues IACR needs to consider:
1. Currently IACR proceedings and/or its journal are/were listed in:
  - Science Citation Index
  - dblp.uni.trier.de
  - etc.
  This is a very important issue for people working in academia, in particular for promotions.
2. Some readers still prefer books over electronic versions. Springer prints these proceedings and these are bought regularly by some bookstores and libraries.
3. The publisher makes advertisements.
4. The issue of long term archiving of electronic data is far from trivial, as for example pointed out in:
  Rothenberg, Jeff (1995) Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents. Scientific American, 272 (January): 42-47.
  Very little progress has been made since the publication of this very interesting paper!
5. If we drop Springer, who will spend the time to work on above issues? Just putting the proceedings on the WWW is not enough!
6. If IACR wants to save money, why do they not start publishing the cost of a meal at each IACR conference/workshop? How much is the cost of IACR spending on non-scientific aspects (food, excursions, gifts, etc.) and how much on scientific and work related ones (conference room, availability of computers and wifi, proceedings, electronic broadcast of rump session, etc.)?